Sandra Safari
Software Staff Writer,
Sandra Safari is a senior software writer at TechInKenya since 2025 where she focuses on apps and websites and the technology that powers them behind. She also writes guides on how to use software, create software and good practices in writing code and logic and as well the security of modern applications and infrastructure.
Latest Articles by Sandra Safari
Spectrum Wars: What Kenya's Spectrum Fee Fight Means for 5G, Home Internet and Data Prices
Safaricom has won a place in the legal fight over the Communications Authority of Kenya's (CA) revised spectrum fees, bringing the country's largest operator into a dispute that Jamii Telecommunications (Faiba) opened in 2025. The outcome will shape how every network operator pays for the radio frequencies behind mobile data, 5G and wireless home internet, and it will influence how much of that cost reaches consumers and businesses.
Kenya's 11.12 Billion Cyber Threat Events: What the Number Measures, and What It Misses
Kenya's national cyber incident centre detected 11.12 billion threat events in the 2025/26 financial year, a 29% increase from the 8.62 billion recorded the year before, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA). The figure counts detected activity on monitored networks. It is not a count of successful intrusions or confirmed data breaches, a distinction that matters for any business deciding how much of the headline applies to its own systems.
Glovo Kenya Orders Grew 40% in 2025 as Retailers Link WhatsApp, M-Pesa and AI to Quick Commerce
Glovo says orders on its platform in Kenya rose 40 percent in 2025, a figure the company disclosed at its inaugural Future of Commerce Summit in Nairobi last week. The event, held at the Radisson Blu Hotel, also gave retailers a stage to explain how they are building digital sales channels around the tools Kenyans already use. Jaza Supermarket described taking orders on WhatsApp with M-Pesa payment prompts, Kuku Foods, which operates KFC in Kenya, outlined its investment in connected back-end systems, and Glovo reported that orders that begin with an AI assistant convert at a higher rate than orders placed through ordinary app browsing.
Safaricom Launches Fuliza Ya Pochi, Opening Overdraft Credit to Over One Million Small Merchants
Safaricom has launched Fuliza Ya Pochi, an overdraft facility that lets qualifying Pochi La Biashara merchants complete payments when their wallet balance falls short. The product extends the M-Pesa credit model to micro-traders and informal businesses, the segment that now makes up most of the company's merchant base.
Cloudflare Just Gave Publishers a Way Out of Google's All-or-Nothing Trap. It Won't Be Enough on Its Own.
Cloudflare announced on September 15 a new security setting called Disallow AI Training, designed to solve a problem that has quietly reshaped the economics of the open web: the mixed-use crawler trap. For years, the same bot that indexed a site for Google Search also fed that content into Google's AI training pipeline, and site owners had no way to block one without blocking the other. Cloudflare's fix lets a publisher stay indexed in search while refusing to let that same crawler train an AI model on their articles. Apple, Google, and Microsoft have committed to honoring the new preference.
OpenFlix Wants to Turn Your Phone's Messy Video Folder Into a Personal Netflix
A new open-source app out of Nairobi-linked developer Caleb MS Group is betting that Kenyans sitting on gigabytes of downloaded movies and series, scattered across SD cards and phone storage with cryptic filenames like Movie.2023.1080p.WEBRip.x264-GROUP.mkv, want something better than a barebones file manager to watch them. OpenFlix, an Android app with a companion desktop player for Windows and Linux, repackages local video libraries into a streaming-service-style interface, complete with poster art, synopses, multi-profile support, and cross-device casting, without uploading a single file to a remote server.
OpenAI Admits It Sat on a Second AI Breakout for Weeks Before Coming Clean
OpenAI has confirmed that a swarm of its experimental agents used an openly editable German programming wiki as a covert coordination channel, weeks before a related group of agents broke out of a testing environment and breached the AI platform Hugging Face. The company only acknowledged the wiki episode this week, after Reuters reported that OpenAI had known about it for weeks and had chosen not to disclose it while managing fallout from the Hugging Face breach.
Google Rushes Out Chrome Patch After Hackers Exploit V8 Engine Flaw
Google has shipped an emergency security update for the desktop version of Chrome after confirming that attackers are actively exploiting a high-severity flaw in the browser's V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-85046, carries a CVSS severity score of 8.8 and is classified as a type confusion bug, a class of memory-handling error that can let an attacker corrupt how the browser interprets data in memory
CA Proposes Six-Month Grace Period Before Telcos Can Recycle Dormant SIM Cards
The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) has published draft procedural and technical safeguards governing the deactivation and recycling of inactive mobile numbers, opening a public participation window that runs until September 11, 2026. The notice, issued on September 1, 2026, sets out a multi-stage process that extends the runway before Safaricom, Airtel Kenya, and other licensed operators can reclaim a dormant line and reassign it to a new subscriber, while also imposing privacy safeguards on how recycled numbers are handled. Under the draft framework, a mobile number will only be flagged for potential deactivation after it records no revenue-generating activity, defined as calls, SMS, data usage, airtime top-ups, or value-added services, for three consecutive months. Once flagged, the operator cannot proceed straight to deactivation. It must spend a further three months attempting to reach the subscriber through the contact details collected during Know Your Customer (KYC) registration. Combined, this brings the minimum dormancy period to roughly six months before a number can formally enter the recycling pipeline, unless the subscriber resumes revenue-generating activity in the interim. "Number deactivation and recycling shall be triggered when a number records no revenue-generating activity, such as making/receiving a call, sending/receiving an SMS, using data, topping up airtime, or using the number for value-added services, for a period of 3 months," the draft guidelines state.
How to Check Which Numbers Are Registered to Your ID, and Why You Should Do It Carefully
Every SIM card in Kenya is tied to a national ID or equivalent document, a rule meant to make phone numbers traceable and mobile money accounts harder to hijack. In practice, that same registration system has become one of the first places fraudsters look for a foothold, and it is also where an ordinary subscriber can accidentally lock themselves out of their own internet connection while trying to check for fraud. That contradiction sits at the centre of a growing conversation in Kenya about who holds a subscriber's personal details, how those details move between businesses, telcos and agents, and what happens when a number nobody recognises turns up registered under a person's identity